MICHAEL MORRIS: From Grosvenor castaways to Gaza, false certainties come at high cost
Disasters strip away all refinement that is non-essential to basic survival to reveal all humans as equally vulnerable and self-interested
Recent holiday reading took me back to some of the most enthralling episodes of my 1970s childhood, hiking the Wild Coast with my late father and elder brother. In particular, traversing the rock shelves north of Lambasi Bay, contemplating the calamity of the Grosvenor running aground there about two centuries earlier. I remember gazing at those unrevealing reefs and struggling to picture the disaster of August 1782. But the utter remoteness of the location, and a sense of the sheer implausibility of rescue, made a lasting impression.
Stephen Taylor’s enormously rewarding account, The Caliban Shore, The Fate of the Grosvenor Castaways, brought it all back. More than that, revisiting the chronicle of the doomed Indiaman stimulated some unexpected thinking about our own times and crises, particularly in the reflected light of Taylor’s skilful illumination of the complexities and subtleties of the setting (African as well as colonial — the Grosvenor was returning “home” from Mad...
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